August 12, 2013

Sacred Lines and Symbols: A Journey Through Japan

By Jonathan Wynn

One of the first things I
noticed when walking around Shinagawa-ku, an area in Tokyo, were these folded
paper ornaments outside of many homes and businesses. They looked like this:

I later learned that
these paper streamers, called shide,
were hung in preparation for a Shinto festival. A piece of paper might not be a
particularly religious object and yet, folded in this fashion, it
became a significant symbol to believers.

I started thinking about
these folded ornaments in terms of how different cultures in cities overlap
onto public spaces. Walking around Tokyo and Kyoto, I was astounded at the
presence of the sacred layer in public. Despite being a very secular society, with
over 70% of the population reporting no religious affiliation (compared with
15-20% in the U.S.), Japan’s urban public spaces are punctuated with lots of symbols,
statues, and little shrines.

Kyoto’s older Higashiyama
neighborhood, for example, is filled with little statues that reminded me of
the Roman Catholic pantheon of patron saints who
supposedly intercede with God on a believer’s behalf for seemingly any
situation (e.g., Bartholomew the Apostle for excessive twitching, and St. John
of God for those who suffer from skin diseases, etc.). On a guided walk of
these objects I came across two statues of historical couple Hideyoshi and Nene.
A little sign instructs passersby to rub their heads at the same time for a happy
marriage. (Nene was Hideyoshi’s primary wife but not his only one, as was the
custom in 1500s Japan).I then came
across a temmangu ox, which, rubbing with your right hand, will bear your
burdens for you. There were other statues too.

In Kyoto I took a picture
I felt captured the everydayness of little wayside shrines, called hokora, as well as a melding of key
concepts in Emile Durkheim’sElementary
Forms of Religious Life­. It is of a small shrine in what is now a parking
spot for a Suzuki motorcycle. In some of these shrines, I’m told, house a
statue of Jizo, the protector of travelers, but in this one there are two
ghost-like figures dressed in white (the color of death and purity), one bigger
than the other.

Durkheim saw religion as
a system that separates the world into the sacred (i.e., objects with spiritual
significance) and the profane (i.e., objects that are mundane and everyday).
The distinction between the two guides human thought and activity, even if the
objects in question are not explicitly religious.

For example, my students get
nervous when I talk about how New Yorkers felt the World Trade Center was
banal, crass, and ugly building and yet, through the 9/11 terrorist attacks,
the once profane icon of American commerce has been transformed into a sacred
symbol. (The lesson over symbolism, particularly Al Qaeda’s mission to attack symbols of American military and
economic power, was mostly lost in the discourse about what occurred that day.)
All this is to say that the definitions of sacred and profane, at times, change
and can even cause a little emotional distress when thinking through them.

Take, for another
example, the engraving in front of this shrine. It’s a swastika. At first, it
is as disorienting to see something that gives me a visceral turn of the
stomach due to its association with Nazi Germany. It is, however, an ancient
symbol used throughout Asia that meant “to be good.”

Thinking about the
multiple uses of the symbol reminds me of a story a friend told me. Traveling
through Vietnam, my friend knew clothing would sometimes have a swastika on it
and carefully inspected several shirts before buying them. Back in the U.S.,
after spending the entire day walking around Manhattan with one of her new
shirts, her husband noticed something, saying, “I think we missed one.” It
turned out that a large swastika pattern was only visible when you looked at
the shirt from a distance, and she was mortified to have walked around so in
public with it. Meanings, she painfully learned, change and are based on
context.

From my sociological
readings and particularly western upbringing, I grew accustomed to a pretty
clear Durkheimian demarcation of the sacred and the profane. But the Shinto
religion is a rather eclectic one, which includes the belief that the sacred is
hidden throughout the natural world, making for lots of curious juxtapositions
in public space.

The Japanese paper
streamers were often hung from straw ropes, believed to attract good spirits
and they reminded me of another sacred symbolism in New York, the eruv. This is a symbolic boundary denoted
by a wire hung overhead, sometimes even a translucent fishing wire, used in
Jewish communities to demarcate of a zone wherein certain activities are
permitted. Although it’s a little more complicated than this, essentially on the
divine day of rest (Shabbat) observant Jews are forbidden to work, carry things,
or even push a baby stroller in public spaces, but the eruv allows these
activities to be conducted within its boundaries. The wire is hung over
sidewalks and streets in a continuous loop, making public areas, sacred ones. I
learned about it in Harlem, when a tour guide used it as an example of how lots of interesting
urban phenomena are hidden in plain sight.

Thinking about the
Japanese shrines, I looked up the Manhattan eruv, to see how many blocks were
designated as this kind of religious zone. One block? Five? Ten? I was
surprised to learn that most of Manhattan
is encircled by an eruv. It is visible sacred culture, if you know where to
look for it. (Here’s a Google Map of it,
and here’s a list of eruvin that might include your
community!)

Why do all these symbols
and lines matter? Well, there are secular and religious purposes, from eruvs
and property lines, and they are significant, whether they matter to you or
not! My travels allowed me to question the secular public sphere, and even gave
me a new way of thinking about another layer of symbolic boundary-making in
cities. If these symbols and boundaries don’t matter to you, perhaps you can
think about those that do concern you
and your particular worldview.